Saddam's tribe ready to embrace him one last time

"We are waiting. Maybe they will arrest us" ... Sheik Ali Hussein Nida, speaking of his request to US forces that Saddam's sons' bodies be returned to their tribe. Photo: Jason South

On a windswept bend in the Tigris River, Sheik Ali Hussein Nida gathered his white robes around himself and made a prediction: "If Saddam faces the Americans he will kill himself to deny them their trophy prisoner."

While the second most senior sheik in Saddam's Al Bunaser tribe spoke, the US hit-squad charged with pursuing the deposed dictator and his closest associates killed at least three Iraqis who apparently stumbled into the middle of an afternoon raid that failed to net Saddam in Baghdad.

A flood of information which the Americans claim to be receiving in the wake of their attack which last week killed Saddam's sons - Uday and Qusay - has heightened US expectations that his capture is imminent.

In the small village of Owja, Saddam's birthplace on the outskirts of Tikrit, Sheik Ali Hussein spoke in reverential terms of his tribe's most infamous trio, but he displayed a feeling rarely revealed by those close to the regime before the fall of Baghdad - fear.

There was only one picture on the wall of the lobby to the sprawling diwan, the meeting room in which the sheiks greet visitors. Asked about a vague resemblance to Saddam in the picture, he said: "No, that is not Saddam. We have taken down all his pictures because we are afraid of the Americans."

His point was well made. As he stood among the 86 upholstered armchairs that lined the walls of the diwan, the view through a great arched window was directly into a neighbouring Saddam palace which has been commandeered as a US military command post.

And twice as he spoke ill of the Americans, the 63-year-old sheik's frail voice was drowned out by the thump of a fleet of US helicopters flying over his family's palace and their luxuriant orchards and plantations that sweep down to the Tigris.

The sheiks are involved in a delicate balancing act - attempting to defend tribal honour, which demands that they pursue the Americans for the return of the bodies of Saddam's sons for a Muslim burial in their tribal lands, and distancing themselves from Saddam's regime so that they will not be found guilty by association.

As children splashed in a surging irrigation canal, the sheik said the American authorities in Baghdad had said the decision to return the bodies of Saddam's sons would be made in Washington and it could take a week to 10 days.

But he too was filled with the suspicion that gnaws at Iraqis despite publication of pictures of the sons' corpses - why use surgical putty to reconstruct their faces? Why did it take more than 200 soldiers more than four hours to storm the house in which they were hiding? Why the unseemly haste to demolish the house, in the northern city of Mosul, when dangerously war-fractured buildings had been left standing in Baghdad?

He said: "It is our duty, our obligation, to demand their return - if the bodies are true, if they are Uday and Qusay. Getting them back will be a test of the American's good intentions for democracy in Iraq.

"We are waiting. Maybe they will arrest us," at which point he crossed his hands to intimate the binding of a prisoner, "or maybe there will be a positive response. But so far the Americans have done nothing for the Iraqis."

Speaking of Saddam's dead sons, he said: "Because we are of the same tribe these young men were very valuable to us. We are so proud of how they fought off 200 US soldiers with all their tanks and helicopters.

"They were really good men."

But he argued that the two should have been captured alive and brought to trial:

"I like people who face death with honour, without fear. History will talk about them forever. Saddam has been known for his bravery since childhood, so I pray no, I hope when the US tries to capture him he will be dead."

His own contradiction was lost on him - put the sons before a court, but not do the same for the father who might be next in line after the former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic before a war crimes and human rights tribunal in The Hague?

As though the former Iraqi leader's 1988 chemical attacks on his own people in Halabja were the only charge against him, he said: "Saddam is totally different to Milosevic. He has personal hard feelings with George Bush, but it was the US that sold chemical weapons to Iraq; Halabja was the work of the Americans."

Then came a defence of the tribe that was steeped in Iraqi history - he had never joined the Baath party and the Al Bunasers had been great landowners who had good relations with the Iraqi kings long before Saddam Hussein came to power.

"We were not so close to him - we are only farmers. I can't deny that we got advantages from the former regime, but there were small privileges. We had nothing to do with city or cigarette business like some of the people who got great advantage from Saddam - his brothers, his cousins and the others around him."

The sheik is a member of Tikrit's post-Saddam town council, but as the US fails to quash the attacks that have claimed the lives of 49 American servicemen since President George Bush declared on May 1 the war was over, he said: "If we get true democracy all will be OK, but if things remain as they are we will become like the [Israeli-occupied] West Bank."